I'm trying to advise someone who is looking to buy a notebook with Windows Vista pre-installed. The machine will only be used for web browsing, email, playing music and very basic photo editing (cropping, redeye correction, etc.). I have priced up two configurations from Dell that seem to be up to the job:

Option 1, $1400:

AMD Turion X2 TL-50

Vista Home Premium

ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 256Mb Hypermemory

2Gb of RAM (there is currently a special offer on this)

Option 2, $1600:

Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.66GHz)

Vista Home Premium

NVidia GeForce Go 8400M GS w/ 128Mb DDR2 Dedicated Memory

1Gb of RAM (upgradeable to 2Gb for an extra $150)

All other core specs are essentially the same.

Now, what I'm interested to know is:

- Will the aesthetic bells and whistles in Windows Vista okay with that integrated graphics controller? I'm guessing that having ample system RAM (2Gb) would allow plenty of memory for that 'hypermemory' feature to draw on, but would it have enough grunt for Vista's graphics hungry user interface?

- Is 2Gb of system memory really necessary for a machine that will only be used for the absolute basics? Is Windows Vista such a resource hog that there would be an appreciable difference in performance between 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM even if the machine is only going to be used for the purposes described above?

From the benchmarks that I've seen it would be fair to say that the Core 2 Duo would fairly comfortably outperform the Turion X2 but I don't think it really matters in this case, so I'd be really interested to hear some thoughts with regard to the graphics and system RAM options.